


Beneath Closed Eyelids

by Condensedcream



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: M/M, Post-Kingdom Hearts III
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28413873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Condensedcream/pseuds/Condensedcream
Summary: Yozora looked like he was operating on no hours of sleep and suffered diminishing returns on coffee consumption. Fuel went in the tank but the engine was broken. His body moved faster than his brain and now that he stayed still he wasn’t much of a threat.Although he did have silver hair.“Are you evil?” Sora asked.People with silver hair in Sora's life had been varying levels of evil. It didn’t hurt to check.
Relationships: Sora/Yozora (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	Beneath Closed Eyelids

Yozora was different when he wasn’t trying to murder Sora, and Sora was grateful to have made it past that that phase of their relationship. He was less grateful that the shift had been achieved in the midst of a heated battle, Sora at the end of the muzzle and his mouth opening to beg for a second to talk things out.

Then he’d gleeked. Gleeked right on Yozora’s fancy gun and everything came to an absolute standstill. Sora had fumbled as he took the gun and buffed the spittle off on his own pants.

He replaced it in Yozora’s hand with a pat and a squeaky apology, but it was over. They both knew nothing could hurt Sora more than fucking gleeking out like that in such a dramatic moment. Mood ruined. Killing Sora would have been a mercy, and Yozora was decidedly not into that.

There was no gun now. No fancy sword. No fast moves. Just Yozora stretched out on the manicured grass of the park, hands beneath his head and eyes closed.

“Are you sleeping?” Sora asked.

“Yeah.”

“But you’re talking to me.”

“I’m always sleeping when I’m with you,” Yozora said.

His voice was flattened by self assurance. He knew his truth and didn’t care to convince anyone else of it. If it was some sort of joke, Sora didn’t get it. He didn’t get Yozora in general. Without the bust ‘em up between them, Yozora had taken to simply existing. Albeit in a good-looking way.

It made him not very real and instead very enigmatic. Like a character from one of Riku’s books where the main character fell in love with someone tall, dark, and handsome. Usually a vampire, too. Or fae. Fairy vampire, whatever.

The point was he was all hot and dangerous, but treated Sora differently from others. Better than others. Or Sora assumed. Considering Yozora had originally tried to knock his block off five seconds into knowing one another, Sora figured that was a thing he was into with everyone.

Sora definitely liked having him around in a necessary way. Ditching him would leave Sora in a busy city with no busy bodies. He’d scoped it out a dozen times, checked in stores with doors that still chimed and slid open and peered into cars idling at street lights.

The liveliest things he found were the flashing ads. Toys and perfumes and snacks he’d never seen. And then there was what he had seen, a travel ad for Destiny Islands. His brain lit up like bonkers and he opened his mouth to gush about it to anyone that would listen.

_That’s where I’m from._

No one would listen, though. The many occupants of Sora’s heart had filtered out into new lives and bodies, returned to a personhood they never should have lost.

He liked to tell himself there was a single flicker that remained behind. A too-much presence within to be a single heart. Yet the pretending did not provide true company so he sat by the ad to give it fond glances, never staring too long at the vivid lights.

Sora worried that if he did the lights would grow brighter and brighter. That he’d go towards them and wake up under the glare of hospital lights. That he’d turn out to be some guy named Trevor, with a wife and two kids and who’d smacked his head on an Adirondack chair while staining his new porch. A weekend-warrior project gone wrong.

That life would be worse than this.

So he kept himself from staring at the sign and stared at Yozora in the meantime.

For a guy that claimed to be snoozing, Yozora looked like he was operating on no hours of sleep and suffered diminishing returns on coffee consumption. Fuel went in the tank but the engine was broken. His body moved faster than his brain and now that he stayed still he wasn’t much of a threat.

Although he did have silver hair.

“Are you evil?” Sora asked.

People with silver hair in Sora's life had been varying levels of evil. It didn’t hurt to check.

“I work for an organized military in an unyielding capitalist society,” Yozora said, one of his longest sentences to date.

“Uh huh…”

“On paper,” Yozora clarified. “But not idealistically.”

“Well, alright. That’s better than full evil, I think?”

Yozora breathed out his nose a tiny bit harder than he usually did. Sora figured that was as close as he got to laughing. It made Yozora more human as he lay on the grass, somehow too detailed to the eye. The unglamorous pigeon greys of his clothes made looking at him easier.

“I have other friends,” Sora said. He didn’t have a reason to bring it up aside from missing them.

Yozora didn’t answer.

“I bet they’re looking for me really hard right now.”

Nothing.

“Are you listening to me?” Sora asked.

“Yes.”

“Then why aren’t you answering?”

“Because I’m listening.”

Sora cast a withering gaze that Yozora couldn’t see. Sora kind of, nearly, borderline missed Xehanort’s trainwreck monologues. Actually, it was kind of great how he wouldn’t shut up sometimes. Not that he usually made sense, but Sora could tell Xehanort was trying to make sense and the effort was appreciated.

How long ago had that been?

“What day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

Sora sighed as he sat down next to Yozora. He looked at both of their shoes. Grass stains on his, scuff marks on Yozora’s. And eyelets. Had eyelets always looked so… like that? Sharp and defined and giving Sora the heebie jeebies?

“What _day_ -day is it?”

Yozora’s eyes opened. They settled heavenwards and Sora’s followed. The sky was forever dark and there were no stars, static or shooting. Light pollution had crowded them out.

“The seventh?” Yozora paused, nodded to himself. “Yeah. Seventh.”

“Cool, thanks,” Sora mumbled.

He’d have liked to get a month out of Yozora, or perhaps a year. But time flowed in unique streams within worlds and it varied too much to have meaning beyond sating the human urge to know. Where Yozora was from could have different names for months or new ways to keep track of years.

Sora had a whiteboard in an empty business office. He tallied the days with the squeak of the wrong kind of marker for the job until he realized he didn’t know what a day _was_. And what did it matter?

He was here and had been here awhile. That he knew sure enough.

His heart recorded the time for him, the bone-deep ache of the untouched growing. He wasn’t alone now, but he was isolated. Fragile, handle with care— or not at all. Yozora had taken the latter route.

Sora hated this hands-off approach.

What could go wrong? Tons of things, actually. And Sora didn’t prefer getting punched in the head to no touch at all. A flu didn’t make you yearn for a cold. Sickness was sickness and Sora was sick down to the sticky insides of his marrow.

He was tired of it. Tired of this empty city with its misleading signs of life. Tired of the squeamish rise of his stomach when he found the nails of his hands to be so real and _naily_ he felt fake. Tired of trying to remember when he’d last slept or woken up.

He must have done them both. As with the days, he didn’t know what these things looked like anymore. This place didn’t make sense and Sora didn’t see why he had to either.

Meanwhile here was laser boy looking like he’d finished an afternoon of reading poetry under a pussy willow and was now resting to contemplate whatever serious-faced people contemplated. Smart stuff, Sora betted.

Like square roots of big numbers or words Sora didn’t know the definition of.

“Hey, what’s a quarto?” Sora asked, putting his theory to the test.

“Beats me.”

Sora blinked. Alright. Theory busted. Two theories. Yozora wasn’t thinking about words Sora didn’t know the definition of, and he wasn’t Xehanort. Xehanort would know what a quarto was. And he’d go on to explain it a little too well and somehow leave Sora knowing less than before.

“A little island,” Yozora said.

Sora blinked.

“What?” he asked. “Little island?”

“Five letters. What’s it called?”

Sora flustered at the question, looking about to see what had spurred it. His gaze fell back to the grass stains of his shoes and moved onto Yozora’s creepy eyelets.

“Islet,” Sora blurted. Of course he knew the word, he’d played on one often.

“Thanks.”

An elbow knocked against Sora, followed by Yozora making an apologetic noise without the words to go along. He tugged from his pocket a piece of paper that was the love child of folded and crumpled. A pencil sharpened down to fun-sized appeared next.

Yozora sat up with a failing degree of effort, gifting himself a multitude of chins as his head craned forward. His torso followed in time and once uprightish he flattened his paper out on the ground. It was marked with the checkered boxes of a crossword puzzle. The answers were written in lightly and lacking commitment. Or otherwise overly erased.

Sora watched Yozora pencil in the answer he’d been given, fold-crumple the paper and repocket it before lying down again.

He went quiet after that. Sora’s mind was anything but.

Yozora was not a fairy or vampire or any combination thereof. He was a dude who did crosswords in pencil and needed help with the answers. And he could touch Sora without hurting him. Or hurting him on purpose. The slight sting in Sora’s shin was practically nothing.

“Can I touch you?” Sora asked, because now Yozora did not seem dangerous so much as moody.

“I don’t know. Can you?”

Sora groaned and rolled his eyes.

“Okay, teacher. You know what I meant! It’s just that I’ve been here for ages. And there’s no one around, and I guess I said it weird but I’m not going to do anything weird—”

“You don’t have to explain yourself. It’s fine,” Yozora cut in.

Sora hesitated.

“Fine like I can touch you? Or fine like—”

“It’s fine.”

Yozora’s categorization of moody remained while Sora added the sub classification of dick.

Sora grumbled as he bit the inside of his cheek. There was a difference in enduring an act and enjoying it. Sora couldn’t do the second if he thought Yozora was doing the first. But now Yozora was giving him a funny sideways look, like a cat waiting for a level of attention it was unwilling to ask for.

Sora’s belief that Yozora had something smart going on in his noggin during his quiet times began to dissolve. The guy just absolutely stunk at talking. His communication abilities were off the charts, and in all the wrong ways.

Yozora never had explained how pulverizing Sora was meant to be helpful.

“Well?” Yozora pressed.

Sora sniffed.

“Are _you_ going to be weird if I touch you, or are you actually going to be into it?”

“I can do both,” Yozora answered.

He followed his words by moving too quickly, rolling and grabbing at once as he snatched Sora faster than the instinct to flee could flare. The surge of adrenaline in Sora’s veins was hot and panicked as he braced for a return to the old status quo and the pain it promised.

None arrived.

Sora was instead wrestled to the ground with little resistance, his body frozen up as Yozora took it down. The ensuing manhandling was as brief as it was thorough, Sora finding himself fully horizontal and fully against Yozora when his head finished rattling.

There was an arm fastened around him. Sora couldn’t tell if he was being held captive or cuddled. Both? Both. Yozora did say he could be weird and into it at once. Actions spoke louder than words.

Sora pushed the conclusion from his mind to ask himself a new question.

Did he like this?

He considered it as he regained himself.

This wasn’t what he’d pictured when he’d made his original request. He couldn’t dream that big in the presence of this place, opting for the idea of sitting together in a non-violent manner. A thigh pressed to a thigh. A one-armed hug.

Yozora had fast tracked them to the snuggling stage.

He wasn’t exactly soft, but his body had some kind of give beneath Sora’s weight. His sternum was pokey and uncomfortable where Sora’s cheek rested, yet the rise and fall of steady breaths was nice and Yozora’s body was warm through the layers of their clothes.

Yeah, Sora decided. He liked this.

The realism of this world made his heart ache in new and unfathomable ways. That he had to find comfort in ways equally new and unfathomable was a kind of logic in this illogical land.

Sora’s nerves were quelled by the closeness, his body relaxing against Yozora’s as time went on. There was a vague smell of aftershave at the collar of Yozora’s shirt that conjured up old memories for Sora.

Memories of snooping in the grand house Riku called home, the two of them sneaking into the master bathroom. It had been a palace of treasures at their size, the bottles and tinctures stocked in the cabinets with labels they could barely sound out together.

‘Aftershave’ had defeated their reading abilities, but Riku had proudly stated he knew what it did. He’d seen his dad use it and explained its purpose. Neither of them could conceptualize shaving themselves. They traded the bottle back and forth, sniffing and giggling and trying to imagine what life would be like once they had beards.

The life Sora envisioned had more fire and tigers than this one. He’d severely underestimated the amount of lasers, plentiful as they’d been in his mind. There was time for the fire and tigers to show up, though. Sora only owned a couple chin hairs currently.

The arm that held Sora fast loosened as he thought, Yozora’s breathing turning slow and drawn out. Sora listened to it the way Yozora listened to him. Taking in sound for what it was. No need to respond.

Yozora was well and truly asleep.

Sora didn’t need to look to know. He lifted his head to do it anyway. 

Yozora looked pretty like this. Tired, dozing, human. The hard set of his jaw had softened and the always-on tension in his body had ebbed. Sora put his head back down and thought to imitate Yozora, letting his eyes close as he found the least-bony spot to rest against.

The lights were far away and couldn’t reach him in the darkness beneath closed eyelids. But sound could. It filtered in through the darkness as a hushed lapping, the white noise of nature. He knew it as well as he knew what an islet was.

It ushered in a new light Sora couldn’t ignore. He opened his eyes. The bleak fluorescence of street lamps was gone and the stark blue of sky was in its place. He sat up to find the gleam of the sea in front of him.

Capitalism, quartos, Adirondack chairs.

What were these things?

_Weird thoughts._

Sora scrambled up and took off for the Special Place. In his head rattled scenes that were scattering like the grains of sand beneath his feet as he ran. Shining puddles on darkened pavement, silver hair and alternating eyes. A name his mouth began to form only for it to spill out unfinished.

The memories unraveled as he took chalk in hand and put it to the slate wall of the cave. He stayed in the darkness as he turned untroubled, what he knew not yet his to remember. These new and strange thoughts had escaped preservation.

Others had not.

A castle he couldn’t find in any book, buildings with peaked roofs out of place on an island. A dog he’d never seen but drawn himself meeting. Things Sora had reason to put down but no recollection as to why.

Sora wondered what it meant. His friends filtered into the cave in time and stood and stared with him, hemming and hawing over the recent works like critics in a gallery.

“What do you think it means?” Sora asked, as if much of it hadn’t been by his own hand.

“I think it means you want a dog,” Kairi said.

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” Riku ventured. “My dad said art doesn’t have to mean anything.”

Sora nodded with feigned thoughtfulness. He’d been there for that. Not that Riku got it right. Riku’s dad had said art didn’t have to make _sense_. That he said it after buying an expensive blob of color on canvas seemed directly related.

But the scenes on the wall made a sort of sense to Sora. The same sense a fresh puzzle made, strewn out and seen in glimpses, the fuller picture yet to come.

**Author's Note:**

> [Quarto.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarto)
> 
> Sora drew many of his weird thoughts on the cave walls, but doesn't seem to recognize them much when they occur. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z65dHqLFHB4&t=401s) provides a nice view of them.


End file.
